Conclusion: Design’s Tricky Future

The idea that design needs to change following the global financial crisis of 2008 and that market-led design may have had involvement in delivering “an unsustainable mode of world-making” is accepted by all the authors in this book. They have pursued this idea by engaging with the concept of “trickiness”, discussing design in the sense of being able to address “awkwardly tricky” or “misleading tricky” things and problems with the ambition of offering an account of one aspect or another of this change. Following Guy Julier’s acknowledgement that design’s ‘variegated practices’ mean we must acknowledge that ‘no one definition is enough’ (2017 p.2), several of the chapters including Srinivas and Staszowski’s (on p.x) discuss the fact that definitions of “design” are themselves far too tricky to be expressed in the singular. Moving from definition, to ‘reach’ – in terms of agency – Jeremy Kidwell (p. x) observes that design discussions should “focus on the need for designers to accept that we design in cooperation with (or in opposition to) other than human agencies”. This is an argument supported by Tonkinwise (p.x) and challenged by Dant (p.x). Both authors in different ways engaging with Latour’s account that ‘design things’– the socio-material entities explored in the introduction - mediate our relation to the world. Put simply, this perspective proposes that design mediates by giving description to the world through applied form that feels like it is reality but which is artificial (Herbert Simon 1968) and constitutes merely a version of the possible.